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Figure out how much you earn on an average month and the # of visitors you get.

Subtract your monthly costs for operating the website and divide that by the # of visitors - now you have the value of an average visitor to your site. On my own sites, they're worth about .008 cents each so I bid on keywords at BRAINFOX.COM where I average at about .003 cents a visitor (yes, they allow tenths of a cent).

Brainfox has less traffic than looksmart or goto so you definitely need at least 100-200+ listings to see any real traffic, BUT, there's a great bonus for signing up-

They'll add 500% to your balance on top of your first deposit. IOW, I made a first deposit of $20 and had a starting balance of $120. The hits come slow but I'm not in it for the short term

I added my site to looksmart few months ago. At first I only got 1 or 2 hits per week. but recently I am getting 10-20 per day. so I say in long run its worth it.
note: Dont expect millions of hits from them

Search around these threads and you'll find some quality comments on LookSmart.

It's all a matter of estimating your return on investment in determining if the fee is worth your while. For some it's a great deal. For others the money would be spent better elsewhere.

The problem with LookSmart is that LookSmart they get the award this year for Marketing Hype. They do not get the award for traffic generation.

People have used LookSmart's use of the word "reach" to equate to "use." And nothing could be farther from the truth.

LookSmart claims their 78% 'reach' through their affiliations with tons of ISP's and other organizations like Road Runner (Time Warner) who use LookSmart to power their personal engines. But how many folks out there use Road Runner or a similar search service to actually search the web?

Very very few people use LookSmart. When they partner with another engine their results are secondary except with the exception of possibly MSN, and even MSN appears to be applying it's own filter to the LookSmart data.

So, take what the folks at LookSmart say with a grain of salt. They were a poor performing directory before they came up with the $79 and $199 submission plan. Just because they now require payment for listing does not make them any better than they use to be.

You pay $199.00 to get your site reviewed. Now what happens to you? I mean that certainly doesn't guarantee that you'll be listed or possibly even worse, where you'll be listed. I mean you could still end up as the 144,000th site listed in your category and that would definately not be worth the money at all. So I was about to sign up for them tonight and start promoting but that has me concerned, I certainly dont want to pay them 199 to end up being listed on the 44th page of when someone searches for web hosting.